# The joy of the open road — and the open-air hotel corridor

Motels, of late, are being rehabilitated, physically and in the popular imagination, and rediscovered.

In places like Palm Springs, Calif., and Austin, the capital of automobile-centric Texas, the trend was well underway, with demand for overnight accommodations and retro or even kitschy motifs inspiring developers to sink funds into turning tired motels into hipster havens, years before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The latter, though, appears to have shifted the trend into overdrive. When wanderlust began to kick back in, many found the idea of a road trip more appealing than a stressful and masked-up flight, to say nothing of more standard airport headaches, and when it came time to book a hotel many concluded that an interior-corridor hotel, with the attendant risk of viral exposure, no longer held the same appeal it did before the early months of 2020.

The motel has been “the perfect kind of hotel during the pandemic,” said Amar Lalvani, chief executive of the Austin hospitality company Bunkhouse, according to the Times story. Exterior-corridor hotels, in fact, he suggested, rank alongside Zoom
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home baking and cryptocurrencies as COVID-era winners.

Bunkhouse, according to the report, is looking to double to 16 its portfolio of mostly renovated motel properties in the coming years.

Read on: Here’s what’s changed in the travel business while you were stuck at home